2026/03/01 by Emily Steinlight
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Historical Architecture and Urbanism #Legal and Social Philosophy
paper · doi:10.1632/s0030812926101874
openalex publication_date 2026/03/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
What is the function of disciplinary self-critique? Why now? The discerning responses collected in this cluster acutely register the timely and untimely conditions of a conversation stretching over the past decade, and they attend from several angles to what is altered or perpetuated in critical reflection on the scope, uses, and locations of a subfield. Echoing Jacob Romanow’s observation that the rubric “Victorian” has become paradoxically more entrenched in the metadiscourses challenging its limits, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong consider whether these further interventions tend toward the same effect. Their landmark essay “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” and related interventions, including Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie’s “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” which have fostered teaching and research beyond the Victorian as such, were circumspect about the force of assimilation—understandably so, since these projects have been ushered into the center of established Victorianist journals and conferences. Efforts to undiscipline, decolonize, or expand the field have appreciably changed how the nineteenth century is studied and taught and have valuably diversified the focus and the demography of conferences that were disproportionately white. But self-criticism, as Olivia Lingyi Xu aptly observes, can also recapitulate the center/periphery dynamic it aims to redress. Programmatic self-correction of Victorian studies’ limits can homogenize categories and harden binaries—sometimes with the result that minoritized and international scholars are courted as “its others,” implicitly personifying a field’s self-critique in the familiar role of native informant. Perhaps this confirms Nasser Mufti’s point that what makes academic disciplines “disciplinary” in Michel Foucault’s sense is not their repression of knowledge but precisely their integrative energies and incitements to speak.